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It’s painful to watch, but the tech sector – and business market in general - bears witness to a company publicly committing suicide – BlackBerry. (Image credit: AFP/Getty Images via @daylife)

Yes, it's been a time of turmoil and seismic change in the market, but in the end, I think it's BlackBerry's leadership who didn't believe in the company, or know how to compete. BlackBerry is like a cancer patient who just gave up and decided to slit its own wrists months ago.

Today, BlackBerry said it will miss revenue consensus by nearly 50%, eat away at its cash by some $500mil, cut 40% of its workforce and collapse its device portfolio from six devices to four.

BlackBerry will re-position (read: discount ) its Z10 device and target consumers. While the company was not specific, it’s difficult to asses whether its BB10 class Q10 or its BB7 class 9720 will join the new Z30. It now intends to have only two “high end” phones left in its portfolio. If we had to guess, the company may decide to focus the 9720 because as a BB7 device it can support existing enterprises work apps beyond email. This would help some very security conscious enterprises to deploy new devices without taking the plunge to a new, and untested, BB10 server environment. It's important to note, that shockingly, BlackBerry apparently provided no incentive to port many older BB7 business apps that enterprise companies use to run on Q10 or Z10 devices.

On a personal note, I use a Q10 as my “work only” phone. It’s a choice I make to carry two phones (my other is the Lumia 1020, my work/life phone). The Q10 is a solid device if you like a keyboard. I do. Both devices play nice with my Office365 services.

Perhaps even more insidious in today's pre-earnings release is that the company continues to imply that its enterprise business has a pulse in its current form. BlackBerry said that commercial and test servers evaluations of its BES10 services are up ~31% from 19K to 25K. For many enterprises taking a look here, I suspect in the case of BES10 even when something is free it will be seen as too expensive. Even as BlackBerry is willing to not charge NOC fees. Investors should expect the service revenue drop again this quarter.

The fact is, all too often companies, especially the financial service segment where BlackBerry dominated and seemed almost unbeatable, have simply moved on to other solutions from companies like include Citrix, MobileIron, Maas360, Microsoft , Good Technology and Airwatch. Earlier this week, I sat in meetings where several retail bank CIO/IT executives told BlackBerry sales folks this sad truth. It was painful…

Many companies that I speak to tell me that they are, or in the process of, decommissioning BlackBerry BES, stopping corporate liable BB device purchases and re-directing those budgets toward other MDM/MAM suppliers. In a nutshell, BlackBerry continues to live in a dream world thinking that it remains the incumbent in the enterprise market. It’s not. If the company is deciding to evolve to a service company, Blackberry needs to act small and become innovative like a startup.

So what's next?

Realistically the operating assets are too tightly coupled for the company to be broken up and sold in standalone as operationally sound piece parts. The device business value is near zero. BBM as a separate business is like the only person on or Android device who owns a fax machine. And the BBM service is tightly coupled to BlackBerry’s NOC if not also to a BES.

Today, BlackBerry cuts its jugular. The only prospects appear to be a purchaser of its largely untested patent portfolio to strengthen its own IP (, Samsung, , IBM, Microsoft). And it’s NOC that has deep connections into hundreds of mobile operators and could be valuable to someone who has an intent to engineer a new mobile global payment network (Apple, Google, Visa, Mastercard).